Letter from Jerusalem

Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin, the new President of Israel, is ardently opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. He is instead a proponent of Greater Israel, one Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. He professes to be mystified that anyone should object to the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank: “It can’t be ‘occupied territory’ if the land is your own.”

At a makeshift theatre in the port of Tel Aviv, hundreds of young immigrants from Melbourne, the Five Towns, and other points in the Anglophone diaspora gathered recently to hear from the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett. A forty-year-old settlement leader, software entrepreneur, and ex-Army commando, Bennett promises to build a sturdy electoral bridge between the religious and the secular, the hilltop outposts of the West Bank and the start-up suburbs of the coastal plain. This is something new in the history of the Jewish state. Bennett is a man of the far right, but he is eager to advertise his cosmopolitan bona fides. Although he was the director general of the Yesha Council, the main political body of the settler movement, he does not actually live in a settlement. He lives in Ra’anana, a small city north of Tel Aviv that is full of programmers and executives. He is as quick to make reference to an episode of “Seinfeld” as he is to the Torah portion of the week. He constantly updates his Facebook page. A dozen years ago, he moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to seek his fortune in high tech, and his wife, Gilat, went to work as a pastry chef at chic restaurants like Aureole, Amuse, and Bouley Bakery. Her crème brûlée, he declares proudly, “restored the faith of the Times food critic in the virtues of crème brûlée.”

The self-regard of Israelis is built, in no small part, around a sense of sang-froid, and yet few would deny that the past year was deeply unnerving. Last July, Israel launched an aerial attack on Lebanon designed to destroy the arsenal of the radical Islamist group Hezbollah, the Party of God, and force its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to return two kidnapped soldiers and end its cross-border rocket attacks. “If the soldiers are not returned,” Dan Halutz, the Israeli Army’s chief of staff, said at the time, “we will turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years.” Israel bombed the runways of the Beirut airport, the Beirut-Damascus highway, and numerous towns, mainly in the south; Hezbollah, from a network of guerrilla installations and tunnel networks worthy of the Vietcong, launched some four thousand rockets, mainly Katyushas, at cities in northern Israel. Israel degraded Hezbollah’s military capabilities, at least temporarily, but there was no victory. Hezbollah survived and, in the eyes of the Islamic world, in doing so won; Nasrallah emerged as an iconic hero; and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, one of his sponsors, called yet again for the elimination of Israel from the map of the Middle East. Halutz, who had dumped all his stocks on the eve of the war, resigned, and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, saw his approval rating fall to as low as two per cent.

Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestine Liberation Organization's chief representative in Jerusalem, is perhaps the most moderate adviser in the councils of Yasir Arafat. (He is no doubt the only one to have worked on a kibbutz or to have written a graduate-school essay at Harvard on Wittgenstein and the role of jokes in philosophical discourse.) On many issues of moment within the Palestinian hierarchy—the morality of suicide bombings, the wisdom of Arafat's rejection of the Israeli offers at Camp David and at Taba, the refugees' demand for the “right of return” to historical Palestine—Nusseibeh disagrees, publicly and in all languages, with the hard men of the P.L.O. and Hamas, and even with Arafat (to the extent that Arafat reveals himself). To him, “martyr operations” are blatantly “immoral,” the flat rejection of the Israeli proposals a “major missed opportunity,” and the right of return a painful delusion best forgotten. It is not obvious why Arafat, who craves the support and supposed authenticity of the maximalists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, appointed a mild man in corduroy and tweed to run the East Jerusalem portfolio. As a scholar and as the scion of a distinguished family, Nusseibeh wields about as much street credibility in the refugee camps of Nablus as a duke among the sansculottes. He has no muscle to offer Arafat, no immediate value, except, perhaps, as an ornament of democracy where democracy hardly exists. There is no argument to be made for Nusseibeh's power—unless one happens to believe in the power of restraint and rational thought.

Mahmoud al-Zahar is a surgeon in Gaza City. Born in Gaza and trained in Egypt, he specializes in diseases of the thyroid. Several mornings a week, he lectures at the local university. On the wall around his house, there is no announcement of his medical or academic credentials but, rather, a graffito in red spray paint that hints broadly at another of his vocations: “There is a great difference between the one who writes history with a pen and the one who acts it out in blood.” Everywhere in the Gaza Strip—in Gaza City, in the Jabaliya refugee camp, in Khan Younis; everywhere but in the anomalous and fortified Jewish settlements—the walls speak the same language: defiant slogans of uprising against Israel; pictures of exploding buses and the young “martyrs” who did the job. Dr. al-Zahar speaks that language. He is one of the leaders of and spokesmen for the Islamic Resistance Movement, which is better known as Hamas.

LETTER FROM JERUSALEM about the significance of the red heifer in Biblical prophecy. Pentecostal preacher Clyde Lott, who is based in Canton, Mississippi, is one of the leading cattle breeders in the Southeast. In 1989, he came across a Biblical reference which stated that the only way for the Israelites to purify themselves was to sacrifice a red heifer and mix its ashes with water. According to the Bible, before the Messiah can return, three great events must occur: the nation of Israel must be restored; Jerusalem must be a Jewish city; and the Temple, the center of worship and sacrifice in the ancient Jewish world, which was destroyed by Romans in 70 A.D., must be rebuilt. In order for the Jews to rebuild the Temple and prepare for the return of the Messiah they must be purified with the ashes of a red heifer. Lott realized that the Second Coming depended on the red heifer. A qualified red heifer has not been found in Israel in almost 2,000 years, but red cattle are not so unusual in the U.S. The ceremony of the red heifer sacrifice has only been performed 9 times in the history of the Jews; according to the Bible, when the 10th heifer appears in Israel, the Messiah will finally return. In 1990, Lott crossed paths with Rabbi Chaim Richman at the Temple Institute in Jerusalem. The Temple Institute is a private organization of Jews who are dedicated to rebuilding the Temple. Lott went to Jerusalem to meet with the rabbis of the Institute and discussed the possibility of exporting American red calves to Jerusalem. During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Jews reclaimed Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, the location of the destroyed Temple, thus setting into motion the current apocalyptic frenzy of the Jewish and Christian extremist groups, who interpreted this victory as the first sign of the return of the Messiah. Yet the land where the Temple had been was now occupied by two old and important Muslim mosques–Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. Jews and Christians are allowed to visit the Muslim-controlled Temple Mount but they cannot pray there. Today, the Mount has become a flashpoint for religious extremists of both faiths, with some Jews and Christians urging the removal of the mosques in order to build the Temple right away. There are about a thousand active supporters of the most radical Temple Mount movements in Israel today, but religious conservatism is on the rise due to the apocalyptic vision that was unleashed by the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War. An unexpected alliance has formed between Evangelical Christians and Jews due to their shared interest in rebuilding the Temple. The writer interviewed Rev. Jerry Falwell about the significance of the Temple to Christians. Many Christians who are helping Israel today are doing so to facilitate the moment when they believe they will be raptured into Heaven. Rabbi Richman and Clyde Lott disavow any association with the Temple extremists. When Richman visited Lott in 1994, he examined Lott's red cattle, and then the two men went on a series of barnstorming tours through Evangelical churches, mainly in the Deep South. The writer spoke with Rabbi Yosef Elboim, who visits the Temple Mount every week and walks around its perimeter. Elboim formed the Movement for the Establishment of the Temple and has recently begun a home for boys who will become members of the same priestly caste who ran the Temple in ancient Jerusalem. In August, 1996, a red calf was born in Israel, on a farm outside Haifa. Its discovery caused a stir among Jews and Muslims alike, but after it grew some white hairs it was officially disqualified. In 1997, Lott, Richman, and a group of West Bank settlers reached an agreement to provide land to raise red cattle. This December, they are planning to ship 500 pregnant cows to the Jordan Valley. The cattle are being bred in Nebraska, on a 3,000-acre spread devoted to Red Angus. There is little doubt that a qualified red heifer will soon be born in Israel. As the events in the decades since the Six-Day War have indicated, such a birth would have serious political and religious ramifications for Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and all three of the major religions involved.

In the Land of Israel, nothing is more telling than the hat on your head. The followers of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson tend to the felt fedoras once favored by sidemen in the old Ellington orchestra, while the Moroccan Sephardim wear the multicolored embroidered caps that were de rigueur for bebop pianists at The Five Spot. A small knitted kipa, or skullcap, signifies the Modern Orthodox Zionist; a slightly greater circumference indicates a settler; a black velvet model is the mark of the ultra-Orthodox and (sometimes, but not always) the anti-Zionist. It is true: to be a discerning Israeli is to be no less an expert in hats than the millinery specialists at Bergdorf’s. The really well versed can simply glance at the brim width, the crown height, and the fur type of a passing shtreimel—a kind of Hasidic sombrero worn on the Sabbath and on holidays—and identify the particular sect of the Hasid in question, his attitude toward Israel as a state, his income, his fealty to certain texts and chants, and the location of his ancestral village in Ukraine or Poland, Russia or Lithuania.

Under Saddam Hussein's threats to exterminate Israel with chemical & biological weapons, everyday life is grim. The Palestinian uprising on the West Bank & Gaza Strip-now entering its 4th bloody year-seems to be controlled more & more by Muslim fanatics. Arab moderates have now allied themslves with Saddam Hussein. Yitzhak Shamir's right-wing coalition is narrow and often seems to be manipulated by extremists. In Jerusalem hardly a day passes without a riot or a stoning, without cars being torched or firebombs thrown; without attempted lynchings or the stabbing of an Israeli by a Palestinian (or vice versa). The Palestinian uprising has hit the Palestinian quarters of Jerusalem as hard as it has hit cities in the occupied West Bank. Tells about the Temple Mount shootings & the proliferation of violence tha followed. Riots by Jews are directed as much against Israeli moderates & media people as against Arabs. Tells about the quasi-official funeral of Meir Kahane, who was murdered in N.Y. In his lifetime he never attracted more than 200 or 300 people to his meetings in Israel. His funeral was attended by a crowd estimated between 15,000 & 20,000. His politics were an amalgam of racism, pornography, & religion. Tells about Shamir, just turned 75 & absolutely immobile in his views. He will not yield a single centimeter of land "not even for what they call "peace" & insists that "the land is ours and only ours" and the "peace" they offer is a fraud. Writer considers Shamir an uninspired leader. Tells about Shamir's long talk with Pres. Bush which lessened tensions between the two countries.